Admittedly we're late on reporting this, but it seems like the camp of four port USB 3.0 host controller makers is growing quickly and about a month ago Fresco Logic quietly joined Renesas, TI and VLI with its own four port host controller. Its latest product is the FL1100 and it gets a couple of additional features over the FL1009

Admittedly we're late on reporting this, but it seems like the camp of four port USB 3.0 host controller makers is growing quickly and about a month ago Fresco Logic quietly joined Renesas, TI and VLI with its own four port host controller. Its latest product is the FL1100 and it gets a couple of additional features over the FL1009.

Fresco Logic is making a big deal about the FL1100 featuring new "hardware-based multi-stream, multi-threaded parallel processing engines" which are meant to help deliver full USB 3.0 bandwidth to each of the four ports. The chip itself is fairly big compared to the competition at 9x9mm, Renesas recently launched µPD720201 measures 8x8mm and has nearly half the pin count at 68 vs 119 pints for the FL1100.

As with the older FL1009, the FL1100 supports xHCI 1.0 and UASP. It also features Fresco Logic's GoXtream technology which the company claims minimizes latency and helps protect real-time data streams when other devices are being used simultaneously. What's new is support for hardware based link power management which is still a fairly new addition to USB 3.0 and it's not a feature all device supports. However, USB 3.0 devices that support LPM can go into sleep states if there are long periods of inactivity.

The final new addition is support for USB battery charging and the FL1100 supports revision 1.2 of the standard. Apparently there's also a special USB charging standard for China that isn't quite the same as the one pushed by the USB-IF, but the FL1100 can apparently auto detect which standard is supported by the device being charged and automatically switch between the two standards. The reason this is needed is because USB devices that supports the USB charging standard will send a handshake that informs the host controller how much power it wants and if this isn't initialized correctly, then the USB device will only get 500mA.

We'll have to wait and see if any of the motherboard manufacturers picks up the FL1100, but at the moment it looks as if Gigabyte is slowly moving from Etron to Fresco Logic, at least on its high-end motherboards.